An easy resolution to keep:

Get outdoors in 2007!

RELEASE: January 12, 2007 – Volume XXXVII, No. 2

New Years resolutions are made to be broken, but here’s one worth keeping: Get out into New Jersey’s great outdoors at least once a month! OK, so it’s not a radical suggestion coming from someone who is conservation minded. But it’s based on the growing recognition of its far-reaching impacts on our health.

In his best-seller Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, author Robert Louv explores the idea that the current crop of children is the first generation spending more of their leisure time indoors rather than outdoors. He contends that this lack of outdoor time contributes to poor health, short attention spans and ignorance and apathy toward nature.

Louv traveled the country for 10 years, interviewed parents and children from inner-city, suburban and rural farmland communities about their experiences with nature. He concludes that a growing obsession with keeping kids safe has essentially driven them out of the free-spirited, unstructured outdoor play that kids of earlier generations took for granted.

Do you remember riding your bike everywhere when you were a kid? How many kids on bikes do you see today? Now there may be sound reasons to keep bikes off of overcrowded suburban roads, but the net result is the same.

Our efforts to protect children from one hazard may actually do them harm in other ways. Louv suggests children who get outdoors to play early and often, thrive in intellectual, spiritual and physical ways that their “shut-in” peers don’t.

It turns out good, old-fashioned outdoor play reduces stress, sharpens concentration and promotes creative problem solving. In fact, there is promising research ongoing that suggests “nature-play” is an effective therapy for attention-deficit disorder.

Many of these same fears keep adults at home too! The good news is there’s almost something instinctual in us that adapts to the outdoors.

So get outside! Start now making plans to hike, camp and enjoy nature activities. The beauty of New Jersey is that there are all kinds of activities that are close to home, no matter where you live.

Pick one weekend a month and turn a lazy day at home into a treasured memory of enjoying New Jersey’s natural beauty! You can read more about Louv’s findings in an interview he did with Salon.com at www.salon.com.

If getting outdoors is a challenge, try reading more about nature or getting involved with important issues like renewing the Garden State Preservation Trust, New Jersey’s main source of funding for the preservation of natural and historic areas. The Trust is scheduled to run out of money this year and you can find information about its renewal at www.outdoorrecreationalliance.org.

I hope you’ll contact me at info@njconservation.org for more information about conserving New Jersey’s precious land and natural resources.

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